Justice Department challenges North Carolina voter ID law

The Justice Department filed suit against North Carolina on Monday, charging that the Tar Heel State’s new law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls violates the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against African-Americans.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the lawsuit at Justice Department headquarters, flanked by the three U.S. attorneys from North Carolina.

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“Allowing limits on voting rights that disproportionately exclude minority voters would be inconsistent with our ideals as a nation,” Holder said. “And it would not be in keeping with the proud tradition of democracy that North Carolinians have built in recent years.”

Holder charged that North Carolina’s legislation wouldn’t just incidentally hurt African American turnout, but was intentionally designed that way.

“The Justice Department expects to show that the clear and intended effects of these changes would contract the electorate and result in unequal access to participation in the political process on account of race,” the attorney general said.

The suit, filed in Greensboro, N.C., asks that the state be barred from enforcing the new voter-ID law. However, the case goes further, demanding that the entire state of North Carolina be placed under a requirement to have all changes to voting laws, procedures and polling places “precleared” by either the Justice Department or a federal court, the source added.

Until this year, 40 North Carolina counties were under such a requirement. However, in June the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the formula Congress used to subject all or part of 15 states to preclearance in recent decades.

The justices’ 5-4 ruling outraged civil-rights advocates, but did not disturb a rarely used “bail in” provision in the law that allows judges to put states or localities under the preclearance requirement. Civil rights groups and the Justice Department have since seized on that provision to try to recreate part of the regime that existed prior to the Supreme Court decision.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, signed the voter ID measure into law last last month.

“Common practices like boarding an airplane and purchasing Sudafed require photo ID, and we should expect nothing less for the protection of our right to vote,” McCrory said at the time. “This new law brings our state in line with a healthy majority of other states throughout the country. This common-sense safeguard is commonplace.”

A law mandating a photo ID for voting was not on the books in North Carolina during the 2012 presidential election. Such a measure passed in 2011 but was vetoed by then-Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat. The Legislature failed to override her veto.

DOJ’s lawsuit objects to the law’s photo ID requirement as well as three other key provisions: the elimination of the first seven days of early voting that took place in 2012, the end to same-day voter registration during the early voting period, and the end to the option of provisional ballots for voters who show up at the wrong polling place.

The chief of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Jocelyn Samuels, said the lawsuit argues that the law has the “purpose, intent and effect of discriminating on the basis of race.”

A North Carolina Board of Elections study in April of this year found that more than 300,000 registered voters in the state did not have a Department of Motor Vehicles-issued ID. African-Americans accounted for 34 percent of those who did not match with the DMV records, although they account for only about 22 percent of registered voters in the state.

Proponents of voter ID laws have argued that they prevent voter fraud, but Holder said Monday that there’s no evidence such a phenomenon is widespread.

“The proof of that is simply not there,” Holder said. “All the studies I have seen, that are reputable, indicate this concern about vote fraud is something that is made up.”

Holder also said some of the provisions in the North Carolina law didn’t seem to have any logical connection to fraud. “It’s hard to see how…cutting back on early voting hours has anything to do with vote fraud,” he said.

DOJ moved in July to put Texas, which had been subject to preclearance statewide until the June Supreme Court ruling, back under preclearance requirements. That move came first in a pending lawsuit over redistricting in the state and later in another case over that state’s voter ID law.

In the Texas cases, the Justice Department is asking that the state be put under preclearance for ten years. However, in the North Carolina case, federal government lawyers are not seeking a specific duration for the new preclearance requirement.

Judges have yet to act on those requests. However, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, complained that the Justice Department’s demand disrespected the Supreme Court decision.

“This end run around the Supreme Court undermines the will of the people of Texas, and casts unfair aspersions on our state’s common-sense efforts to preserve the integrity of our elections process,” Perry said in a statement.

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that an Indiana voter ID law was constitutional. However, the justices did not deal with the question of whether that law or a similar law in another state might violate the Voting Rights Act. Civil rights advocates have insisted that the Voting Rights Act puts a greater burden on states seeking to restrict voting when doing so disproportionately affects minority groups.